Dr. Alam
is a Professor of Economics at
Northeastern University
in Boston.

No idea has played a more seminal role in the recent history of Jewish and Christian Zionism than the Jewish doctrine of divine election or chosenness.[1] Since this doctrine is the cornerstone of Zionism, divine sanction for Jewish uniqueness has been inseparable from Israeli exceptionalism and Israeli history.[2]

At first, political Zionism had little to recommend itself aside from the mythic allure of the Promised Land. Most Jews greeted the project alternatively with consternation and derision. They could instantly sense that the creation of a Jewish state would give an impetus to anti-Semitism in Europe; the project also struck most of them as a fantastic utopia with little chance of success. The success of the Zionist plan required three steps: persuading Jews to abandon their homes in Europe for the hazards of colonizing a backward land, wresting Palestine from its Ottoman sovereign, and somehow making the Palestinians disappear. Some very real hurdles blocked each of these steps.

In addition, there was another hitch. The political Zionists did not have the religious sanction to work for Jewish restoration to Palestine. Jews had long believed that this would be the work of the Jewish Messiah as part of God’s plan for the culmination of history; and some had come to invest the return to Zion with symbolic meaning that could be pursued even in exile. Overcoming these theological objections would not be easy.

The Zionists, some of whom were secular, regarded these objections as minor inconveniences. The vision of reconstituting Jewish power was heady. It revived Jewish memories of Davidic splendor. It inspired hopes of establishing Jewish power in the Middle East on a scale that their ancestors could not attain in ancient times. In as much as it appeared utopian, even quixotic when it was first proposed, Zionism offered a Nietzschean challenge to create a new world, to change a destiny of ‘exile’ into which Jews had been trapped for close to two millennia.

Once the moral implications of their plan became clearer, the
Zionists would again find the doctrine of Jewish chosenness handy.
“One need only imagine what would happen in the world,” Nahum Goldmann
was to write, “if all the peoples who lost their states centuries or
millennia ago … were to reclaim their land.”[3] In other words, how
were the Zionists going to justify the ‘theft’ of Palestinian land? One
argument claimed that since the Palestinians were not a
‘people’—presumably, because they were not rulers over Palestine – they
had no juridical rights over their lands. Another, more cleverly argued
that most of the Arabs living in Palestine at the end of the British
mandate were not natives; they were recent immigrants from neighboring
Arab countries, attracted by the growing demand for labor induced by
Jewish colonization.[4] A third argument was simpler. It contended that
Palestine was ‘empty,’ that the Palestinians simply did not exist.

However, it was the theological doctrine of chosenness that would most
convincingly settle the morality of Zionist claims to Palestine.[5] The
Zionists would have little difficulty convincing their Jewish and
Christian audiences, the only ones that mattered at that time, that
this was no ‘theft.’ It was widely believed by populations raised on
Biblical myths that God had promised Palestine to the Jews as their
eternal inheritance. Since Jewish ownership rights were divinely
ordained, they could not be annulled by absence of the owners. In other
words, Zionism was not a colonial movement to expropriate the natives:
it was a ‘messianic’ movement to restore Palestine to its divinely
appointed Jewish owners. The European Jews who arrived in Palestine
could not be accused of stealing their lands; as the Jewish National
Fund claims, they were only ”redeeming” lands which had had always
been theirs.

The sacred history of the Jews supported Zionist
plans on another important matter. The Zionist plans for a Jewish state
required a Jewish majority in Palestine, and preferably a territory
cleansed of its native inhabitants. At first, the Zionist thinkers gave
little thought to the Palestinian presence. They assumed that the
Palestinians were Bedouins, temporary sojourners, without any love for
their land or homes, and could be easily persuaded to move on.[6] When
the Palestinian resistance dashed these hopes, the Zionists quickly
made plans to evict them from their lands by force of arms. Indeed, in
1948 the Zionists nearly implemented their totalitarian vision when
they expelled some 800,000 Palestinians, leveled their towns and
villages, and made sure that they would never return to their homes in
the Jewish state of Israel. This may have been troubling to some, but
Zionists steeped in Jewish sacred history knew that their Lord had
urged even more radical measures when their ancestors were taking
possession of Canaan.[7]

The theology of chosenness offered
another advantage; it did not limit Zionist ambitions to Palestine
alone. The Lord’s promise was not restricted to Canaan; in a few more
generous verses, He had expanded the Jewish inheritance to include all
the lands between the Nile and Euphrates (Genesis: 15.18).”[8]
With present-day borders, this expansive Israeli empire would include
Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and perhaps more. If the
Zionists could successfully use the Bible to claim Palestine, they
could invoke the same divine authority to claim the rest of the Arab
Middle East as well. In the middle of the Suez War in 1956, Ben-Gurion
told the Knesset “that the real reason for it [the Suez War] is ‘the
restoration of the kingdom of David and Solomon’ to its Biblical
borders. At this point in his speech, almost every Knesset member
spontaneously rose and sang the Israeli national anthem.”[9]
The doctrine of election did not merely set the Jews apart from other nations; they were set above
other nations.[10] Over time, this has encouraged racist tendencies.
Since the Jews were the chosen instruments of God’s intervention on
earth, this was interpreted by some Jewish thinkers to mean that Jews
were not subject to the laws of nature and society.[11] In other words,
as long as the Jews believed that they were acting as instruments of
God’s will, they did not have to follow the laws of gentile nations. As
Israelis have moved to the religious right, a shift propelled by the
rationale and experience of Zionism itself, Zionist advocates have
shown an increasing willingness to justify their human rights abuses as
a Jewish prerogative. As Zionist plans continue to be challenged by
their victims, the ‘chosen people’ slowly but surely take on the hues
of a ‘master race’ with the power to legitimize their actions by merely
willing them into existence.

[1] All quotes from the Jewish Bible are from: Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds., The Jewish study Bible (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004): 111, 383

[2] The doctrine of Jewish chosenness incorporates three
interlocking divine choices made by the God of the Jewish scriptures.
First, God chose Abraham’s lineage through Isaac to be His “treasured
people (Deuteronomy: 7.6), a people “consecrated” to the Lord and “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation (Exodus:
19.5).” He also chose a land where His people would come together;
although its borders vary, this land always included the land between
the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea as its core. Like God’s
chosen people, this land too was unique: it was a pure land, “flowing
with milk and honey (Exodus: 33.3),” devoid of impurities, the
best of all lands on the earth; it was also a holy land, set apart from
other lands, because it was His earthly dwelling place. Finally, this
God makes a Covenant with His chosen people. He promises to given them
owners and rulers over the holy land, and to guide, bless and favor
them as long as they observe His laws. Conversely, He threatens them
with dire punishments, including exile from the Promised Land, if they
break their Covenant (Exodus: 19.5). It appears that the
cumulative deficit in Jewish conduct finally led to their expulsion
from the Promised Land in the first century CE. In their centuries of
exile, the overwhelming majority of the Jews lived in Europe and the
Middle East outside of Palestine.

[4] This argument was revived in 1985 by Joan Peters, From time immemorial: The origins of Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine
(New York: Harper and Row, 1985). Joan Peters attributes the natural
increase since the 1850s, brought about by improvements in health care
and sanitation, to immigration. This natural increase can also be
observed in Israel’s Palestinian population: that is, among the 150,000
who survived the ethnic cleansing of 1948-49. In 2004, that population
had grown to some 1.3 million. Although Peter’s book was widely
acclaimed by the leading Zionists in United States, including Saul
Bellow and Barbara Tuchman, the book, according to Norman Finkelstein,
is a “monumental hoax.” See Norman Finkelstein, Image and reality of the Israeli-Palestine conflict (London: Verso, 1995).

[5] This was starting point, the chief inspiration for nearly
all the early Zionists. Anita Shapir writes: “One of the covert
assumptions present among all the poet and the majority of Zionist
thinkers and leaders was that Jews had a special right to the Land of
Israel, that is, Palestine.” Ahad Ha-Am also commented that this was “a
land to which our historical right is beyond doubt and has no need for
farfetched proofs.” Anita Shapira, Land and power: The Zionist resort to force, 1881-1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 40-41.

[6] In an essay he wrote in 1891, after a short trip to
Palestine, Ahad Ha-Am wrote that Jews in Europe believe that “all Arabs
are savages of the desert, a people similar to a donkey.” Quoted in
Anita Shapira, Land and power: 42.

[7] As the Israelites prepared to take possession of the
Promised Land, the Lord’s instructions were unequivocal: “When the Lord
your God brings you to the land that you are about to enter and
possess, and He dislodges many nations before you … and the Lord your
God delivers them to you and you defeat them, you must doom them to
destruction: grant them no terms and give them no quarter Deuteronomy (7.1-3).”

[8] Similar promises were also made in Deuteronomy: 11. 24 and Joshua: 1.4.

[10] In 1904, Rabbi Kook, the chief Ashkenazi rabbi of
Palestine, wrote: “So on the collective level of Israel, God ordained
these two faculties: a faculty corresponding to the physical entity,
that aspires to material improvement of the nation …, and a second
facet devoted to the cultivation of spirituality. By virtue of the
first aspect, Israel is comparable to all the nations of the world. It
is by dint of the second aspect that Israel is unique, as it says: “The
Lord leads it [Israel] alone”; “Among the nations it [Israel] shall not
be reckoned.” It is the Torah and unique sanctity of Israel that
distinguish it from the nations.” Rabbi Isaac Hakohen Kook, When God become history: Historical essays of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hakohen Kook, translated by Bazalel Naor (Spring Valley, NY: Orot Inc., 2003). http://www.orot.com/history2.html

[11] In the fifteenth century, Isaac Abravanel, a Jewish statesman and
bible commentator, offered a clear statement of the doctrine that
Jewish election – in the words of his modern biographer – offered them
“exemption from the laws of nature and society that govern gentiles.”
See: Seymour Feldman, Philosophy in a time of crisis: Don Isaac Abravanel, defender of the faith (London: Routledge/Curzon, 2003): 137-38.